Around the time that Disney’s version of Alladdin came out, there was another animated film about Alladdin or some other Arabian Nights theme. I saw a preview for it, and the style was very lavish (but off-puttingly impersonal; no doe-eyed Disney characters here). There was a musical score, one song had the Forty Thieves singing something like “We’re what happens when you drop out of school.”
This would be Arabian Night, also known as The Thief and the Cobbler. It took British animator Richard Williams almost 30 years to finish this film (all the money he got from his other projects would go directly into this, IIRC), and by the time he finished it, the distributors added songs to it, and based on the time it was released, probably ended up looking like an Aladdin ripoff.
It’s kind of tragic to watch, really. There’s some really great, stylish animation mixed in with the worst kind of saturday morning stuff, complete with awkward, unnecessary songs. Even some of the good stuff has gratuitous narration put over top of it. It’s a shame Richard Williams wasn’t able to finish the film the way he intended to.